Xbox One stock locator: How to get an Xbox One today

This morning, the Xbox One went on sale — and, perhaps surprisingly if you’ve been following all of Microsoft’s policy about-turns, the console promptly sold out. Unlike the PS4, which was stocked in retail stores in heavily populated areas until mid-afternoon on its release day, the Xbox One appears to have sold out a lot faster. Is the Xbox One more popular than expected, or did Microsoft simply provide less stock for launch day? If you want to get your hands on your Xbox One — if you’re looking for an Xbox One stock locator — you’ve come to the right place.

How to find Xbox One stock on launch day

This late in the day, if you’re in a metropolitan area (New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, etc.) you will probably need to travel some distance to find a retail store with the Xbox One in stock. We would strongly recommend that you call ahead to make sure that the store has stock, and preferably ask them to reserve a console for you — though don’t be surprised if many stores refuse to reserve one.

We would usually recommend using online stock checkers to find a store with the Xbox One in stock, but for some reason the stock locators for every big retailer have been offline since this morning. We know for a fact that Walmart, Best Buy, and Target had stock of the Xbox One this morning — but the online stock locator said otherwise. Thus, if you want to buy an Xbox One today or tomorrow, your best bet is sadly to call up lots of retail stores and hopefully find one with stock. You should start with stores that are a few miles outside of heavily populated areas, and then expand your search from there. An easy way of finding stores is to head to Google Maps, type the name of the store (Walmart, Best Buy, GameStop, Toys R Us, Target), and then clicking the pins that pop up to find the phone number.

If you do find a retail store with the Xbox One in stock, please leave a comment so that we can update this post.

The Xbox One launch event in London, England

Be alerted when the Xbox One is in-stock

If you can’t find an Xbox One in a nearby retail store, your best bet is to use a service like Wiialerts, which sends you an SMS when an online store gets some Xbox One stock. Wiialerts tracks the online stock levels of Amazon, the Microsoft store, Walmart, Best Buy, GameStop, and others. The Wiialerts website also shows you when a store last had the Xbox One in stock — for example, Target apparently had Xbox One stock for 14 minutes earlier today before it sold out again.

If all else fails… Ebay!

If you absolutely must have an Xbox One right now, Ebay is your best bet. There are now so many listings for the Xbox One on Ebay (about 5,000 at the time of publishing) that you can buy a console for “just” $ 650. Unless you really need to play Forza 5 or Ryse, though, you’re probably better off waiting for the next shipment of Xbox Ones to arrive from China — which will almost certainly be before Christmas. In short, you can pay an extra $ 150-200 to get the Xbox One now, or just wait a couple of weeks to get one for the $ 500 MSRP.

The other alternative, of course, is to buy a PS4 — it’s out of stock at the moment, but it’ll probably come back in stock slightly before the Xbox One. Or you can build a PS4-like PC for around $ 400.